Swedish company: Forsman & Bodenfors

Filip Nilsson has devoted the past 23 years of his life to Forsman & Bodenfors, an agency credited with producing a raft of award-winning digital campaigns. Here he reveals the key to his company's success.

Sitting in an extremely busy Stockholm restaurant a week before Christmas, Filip Nilsson, chairman and executive creative director of Forsman & Bodenfors (F&B), is a relatively happy man. And why shouldn’t he be? Soon to fly back to his native Gothenburg (where he still lives) for the office Christmas party, he can reflect on a good year for his agency and look forward to similar fortunes.

Nilsson is unashamedly a one-company man, having worked at F&B since 1988, joining only two years after the still-independent agency was formed. When he was starting out, he wanted to move from Gothenburg to Stockholm, but with a wife and child it wasn’t a viable option so he had to look closer to home.

“I was always interested in communications [industries],” explains Nilsson, “but then I went to business school. You were supposed to go from there to a big Swedish company such as Volvo or Ericsson, you know, and I just felt that, when I tried it, it was not going to work. It wasn’t my thing. So then I started thinking about what else I could do, and I looked into advertising and I became totally obsessed with it, knowing that was where I wanted to go.”

F&B was a young but already respected company, based in Gothenburg and looking for intelligent, interesting and, most of all, creative people. Nilsson was hired. Now, 23 years on, he heads up the agency and, although typical Swedish modesty prevents him from saying so, he’s doing a damn good job of it. In autumn 2009, his agency produced one of the most interesting and creative digital campaigns of the last few years. It picked up numerous awards in the following months.

IKEA Showroom saw F&B build a Facebook profile for Gordon Gustavsson, the store manager of the Malmö branch of IKEA, upload 12 different showroom images to the profile and utilise the ‘tag’ function on Facebook to allow members of the public to be the first to tag their name to a product and therefore win it. The campaign picked up a bronze, two golds and a Titanium Lion in Cannes last year. F&B embraced the digital revolution, like many other Swedish companies, long before anyone else.

“I think the best thing we did was to take the decision almost 10 years ago that digital was going to be part of the future,” says Nilsson. “And if that was the case, then it should really be inside the agency; it should be everywhere. So we closed down our daughter [digital] company and integrated it and just basically said that all creatives of Forsman were digital creatives, and if you don’t want to be that you have to work somewhere else.”

Leading light in digital

That slightly radical but forward-thinking plan certainly paid off and F&B is now thought of as a leading light in digital and was recently named by the Gunn Report as the world’s joint number-one digital agency alongside DDB Stockholm. That can play against Swedish companies, though, as Nilsson explains, because other agencies, maybe from London or New York, can come knocking on the door to take your home-grown talent abroad.

“It’s almost like you’re not a cool agency unless you have two or three young Swedes,” he says. As well as the pure talent in Sweden, Nilsson thinks that relationships between agency and client are key to success. There is, he says, a mutual respect for each other – “a true partnership” that some countries don’t seem to have.

Another secret to F&B’s success is the way they choose their young creatives. “Our way of doing things is to recruit young people and give them an awful lot of responsibility early on,” says Nilsson, “but also let them take the credit for what they do too.” Doubtless there will be a lot of credit to take in the coming months and years.

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